Violent Histories, World Literature, and the Politics of Touch

The first book-length study of the politics of touch in contemporary world literatures, this book identifies new trends in 21st century world literatures of memory and proposes new pathways for comparative reading.

What does it mean to write ethically about violence today? How should we consider the relationship between diverse histories of modern violence, including the Holocaust, colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade? What are the limitations of empathy as a response to the suffering of others? What might it mean instead, as the anti-colonial psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon once asked, to try to ‘touch’ the other?

Examining work by Teju Cole, Katja Petrowskaja, Han Kang and Claudia Rankine, this book explores how contemporary world literary authors create new, anticolonial imaginaries through their representations of entangled, transnational histories of modern violence.